What Another Blog?

I wish I could say that I just came up with this idea all on my own, but that is okay. It was a great idea and I need to do it. So, it does not matter whose idea it was, all that matters is, now, is that I follow through with it.

I recently started a new job. That in and of itself is not that big of a deal except that this marks a big shift for my life. Not to belittle what I have been doing for the past fourteen years of my life, because it was a very important thing as well. For nearly fourteen years I have been a stay-at-home dad. A very important and so much more than full-time job. But my youngest has now finished kindergarten and will be going into first grade and I am not needed at home full-time, so I am freed up to return to the work force. This will impact my family financially in many ways, but it also means that some other things that we, and especially me, have enjoyed because I have been home all of these years will change.

But all of that has little to do with what this post or this blog has to do with other than to set the stage for where I am going with this post and why I am starting this blog. Forgive me for rambling for a minute or two, I will get to the point quickly, I promise.

Anyway, I have started a new job and I drive almost an hour each way to get to work and then back home each day. Some people would think that unacceptable and others would say, "that's nothing." There was a time, several years ago, when we still lived in California and only had one child at the time and I took a short-term contract to go and work for NASA as an IT support tech. This was a fun job and it will forever give me the ability to throw, "When I used to work at NASA..." into conversations just for fun. But, when I worked at NASA it was about an hour and a half commute from home, if there was no traffic. The only problem was it was in the heart of the Silicon Valley and you had to compete with SF Bay Area commuter traffic to get there.

I quickly learned that there were patterns to the traffic. If I left home at the right times, I would get to work in about one and a half to two hours, but if I missed that window, it could take up to five hours. To illustrate this, let me explain how this worked out. If I left home at 5:00 am, I would get to the parking lot of my office by 6:30-6:45 am and could sleep until 8:00 or 9:00 am, depending on how early I wanted to start my work day. If I left the house at 5:15 am, I wouldn't get to the parking lot of my office until around 10:30-11:00 am. The same was true on the way home, but I eventually figured out that if I missed the window on the return trip I could stop at a restaurant, have desert and sit for about a half hour and another window would open up within in an our of the last one.

But what I learned to love about commuting wasn't problem-solving traffic patterns, which, by the way I am a problem solver by nature and figuring out any complex puzzle like that brings extreme delight, rather I learned to love spending time with God and taking in a steady diet of good solid spiritual teaching. Everyday on my drive to work I would spend time pouring my heart out to God about everything in my life and then about half-way through the commute it would be time to tune into one of the largest Christian radio stations on the West coast and catch Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, which was followed by Harvest Ministries with Greg Laurie. These were two men that I greatly respected and they both just always seemed to cut right to the marrow of where I was living and challenge me at an intellectual level as well as a spiritual one. Then on my way home, in the late afternoon I would catch Focus on the Family followed by Family Life Radio.

Now, out here in New Mexico we have KLOVE and Air 1, which are good, most of the time and we actually have quite a few other local Christian radio stations. I have tried listening to them but there signals don't reach very far and their programming seems to be targeted at two feet in the grave crowd. I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone who listens to those stations regularly, but their programming mix just doesn't fit with my tastes or needs.

While lamenting about not having that same special spiritual feeding times, like I had before when I commuted to work, my pointed out the obvious fact that her uber technical, gadget loving, super internet savvy husband should not have been oblivious to, "You know you can download the shows you miss as podcasts and play them back on your iPhone through your car stereo to listen to on your way to and from work everyday."

I quickly went online and started downloading all of the available podcasts from iTunes and some directly from the broadcasts websites. I have been catching up on the past few years of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram now for the past two weeks and, as usual, he is hitting right were I am living. Two of the series, "Biblical Priorities" and "Contentment" have really convicted me and that is why I am starting this blog. Sorry I had to take the long way to get to the last few sentences of this paragraph, but I hope you see it as worthwhile.